Lockdown

The teacher appreciation box on top of the kindergarten cubbies in an elementary school I know is an old, dented cookie tin whose lid no longer fits. This time of year, it’s stuffed with thank-you notes and gift cards, for bookstores, mostly, or for a stationery shop around the corner, where crayons can be got cheap. Everyone’s been counting the days till the winter holiday, but first comes the school concert, no less wonderful, every year, for being so horribly bad. Report cards will be sent home next week, in manila envelopes that smell, inexplicably, like Cheez-Its.

In Newtown, Connecticut, there were five days left until Sandy Hook Elementary School was supposed to get out for winter vacation when Adam Lanza, twenty, killed his mother and then drove to the school wearing black fatigues and carrying two semi-automatic handguns, a military-style assault rifle, and a hundred rounds of ammunition. In a hallway, he shot and killed the school’s principal, the school psychologist, and three more people. In two first-grade classrooms, he shot and killed twenty very young children: six- and seven-year-olds. And then, it seems, he shot himself.

There is no solace to be found, not in the crushing, aching sympathy felt by everyone on hearing the story, not in the candlelight vigils, not in the agony of the President, who, during a press conference, winced, and was nearly overcome. This is the face of a nation undone.

It has been a hard year. There was a high-school shooting in Ohio, a Stand Your Ground shooting in Florida, a college massacre in California, and, in Colorado, a shooting spree in a movie theatre. There were shootings in hospitals and shootings on the streets, shootings in temples and shootings in shopping malls. There were shootings in kitchens and shootings in back yards. This shooting, a shooting in an elementary school, is a last chapter in an American Book of Job: What have we more?

It has been a hard year, but it has not been an unusual year. A hundred thousand Americans are shot with guns every year; one in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. Here are some other numbers: In Washington, there are four hundred and thirty-five members of Congress and a hundred Senators. For two decades, Congress has been dismantling civil society one piece of legislation, another atrocity, at a time. Some vote this way, some vote that. Meanwhile, there are more guns—enough for every man, woman, and child—more easily bought, more easily hidden, shooting more bullets, faster than ever. Not long ago, a Senate bill that would have made it legal for armed citizens to carry concealed guns between states was defeated by just two votes.

At Sandy Hook yesterday morning, teachers and librarians tucked children behind bookcases, secreted them in closets, and locked them in bathrooms to hide them from the gunman. Elementary school will never be quite the same again, the way that college, after Virginia Tech, was never quite the same, the way that high school, after Columbine, was never quite the same. Children—barely older than toddlers—will be drilled, will be taught what to do when the shooting starts. Duck, hide under your desk, and be still. “Shh,” we will whisper to them as they huddle and tremble. “Be as quiet as a bunny.”